A remedial lesson in urban form and economics (part 1)

Phil Hayward of New Zealand sent me an early draft of an amazingly insightful paper on urban form and economics. Unfortunately it’s not currently on the Internet, so I can’t link to it, but I can share my favorite excerpts (italics and bold highlighting mine). In fact, there are so many, I’m splitting them over two posts this week and next. Long-time readers will recognize themes similar to my older posts.

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In Melbourne, the CBD accounts for 10 percent of the employment and approximately 62 percent of its workers use mass transit. Outside the CBD, the share of workers using mass transit is about nine percent. Why the big difference? It is simply because mass transit uses a hub and spoke design system that provides direct service without transfers, to downtown areas. It is not financially feasible to provide hub and spoke access to other employment centers and it is thus impossible for mass transit to be automobile competitive.

(and yet we continue to hear calls for commuter rail in Houston, despite our large number of different employment centers and less than 7% of jobs downtown. Here’s a better answer.)
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The New York urban area has the longest work trip travel times of any major urban area in the USA, at approximately 35 minutes. This is simply because so many people use mass transit, which takes on average 75 percent more time than commuting by car. The average commute time in Los Angeles is approximately 27 minutes.
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For a city to have a CBD as dense as Manhattan in the modern age, several historic preconditions are necessary. Firstly, that CBD has to have achieved that density in an era predating the ubiquitous use of the automobile. No CBD in the world has achieved “high” density, after its populace could afford and were allowed to use, automobiles.
…Low land costs and non-obstructive permission processes also increase productivity. This is a major factor in the USA’s world-leading economic productivity levels, which are now some 40% ahead of strictly-planned, inflated land-cost Britain.
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Housing has always remained affordable in cities where fringe land has been freely available to the urban economy with a minimum of “planning gain” accompanying development processes. In contrast, urban growth restrictions cause property price volatility and bubbles, as we should have well and truly learned by now. There are also numerous negative economic and socio-economic effects to inflated urban land prices, such as reduced productivity, reduced discretionary income, and reduced social mobility.
…“Manhattan-isation” cannot be achieved with property rights and market freedoms intact.
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Even the oft-heard argument that “peak oil’ and rising fuel prices will cause changes in our location and density preferences, do not affect the foregoing reality. Rising costs of travel capitalise into property prices at “efficient” locations anyway. The current “cost of automobility” actually includes a very high discretionary component. The rising efficiency of automobiles has resulted in people buying larger, more comfortable, higher-performance automobiles. The potential low end cost of “automobility” in real terms, has in fact steadily dropped, even as oil prices have risen. There has probably never been as low cost automobility as a few-years-old, already-depreciated, yet still reliable 1300cc Japanese hatchback. (Depreciation is one of the main costs). We have plenty of room to maneuver yet, to retain the benefits of automobility in the face of rising fuel costs, by sacrificing size, weight, and performance as well as enjoying further technological advances. Mass transit is actually not a “solution” at all, as it causes major losses of productivity, and the cost of imposing the “urban form” that would grant it some competitiveness with “automobility”, is economically prohibitive.